I became the Incredible Shrinking Mother the year they started junior high. If our relationship today depended on physical clout, ...I would have about the same influence with them that the republic of Liechtenstein has on world politics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The junior senator from Wisconsin, by his reckless charges, has so preyed upon the fears and hatreds and prejudices of the America...n people that he has started a prairie fire which neither he nor anyone else may be able to control.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Long before your child sets foot in his dorm, you'll begin the transition to college-style parent. It's a transition fraught with ...misgivings and exuberance, with self-doubt and bursts of confidence, with joyful letting go and tearful hanging on. And in case you think these refer only to your child's feelings, they don't. These [emotions] besiege just about every parent along about second semester of junior year in high school. That's when the reality sets in that your child--not someone else's this time--will be going off to college.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is gett...ing all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

It is no accident that banks resemble temples, preferably Greek, and that the supplicants who come to perform the rites of deposit... and withdrawal instinctively lower their voices into the registers of awe. Even the most junior tellers acquire within weeks of their employment the officiousness of hierophants tending an eternal flame. I don't know how they become so quickly inducted into the presiding mysteries, or who instructs them in the finely articulated inflections of contempt for the laity, but somehow they learn to think of themselves as suppliers of the monetarized DNA that is the breath of life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Before I get through with you, you will have a clear case for divorce and so will my wife. Now, the first thing to do is arrange f...or a settlement. You take the children, your husband takes the house, Junior burns down the house, you take the insurance and I take you!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The parent-adolescent relationship is like a partnership in which the senior partner (the parent) has more expertise in many areas... but looks forward to the day when the junior partner (the adolescent) will take over the business of running his or her own life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Democritus plucked his eye out because he could not look at a woman without thinking of her as a woman. If he had read a few of ou...r novels, he would have torn himself to pieces.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

If "heavy metal" was the Anglo-American contribution to low culture, then "rap" was the African-American donation. And if "metal" ...came from the garage where Junior had been sent with his guitar and extension cord, then rap came from the street where young blacks played the only instruments they could afford--the mouth organ and the foot drum. Rap is performed in street clothes; metal in elaborate costumes of leather and fringe. In metal, the volume carries the aggression; in rap it is the words. Both are rife with adolescent misogyny, homophobia, and threats of violence. They are rude, bawdy, boastful, with a kind of "in your face" aggression (called "attitude") characteristic of insecure masculinity. Both musical forms were unique, however, in that they produced platinum records with little radio exposure. They found their audience on MTV.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »